ok. so, let's talk...

the david dobrik of it all.....

for as long as it has been around, youtube has always championed its biggest creators. it has given them preferred advertiser tiers and highlighted them in panels and on its global trending pages, for better and more notably, for worse. logan paul's video documenting the dead body of someone who had committed suicide was trending for days. pewdiepie's nazi "satire" was frequently called out by other media sources but had a safe home on youtube. now after weeks of coverage from various smaller channels and years of harbouring the footage that has recently been resurfaced, youtube chose instead to highlight david's "apology" to their global trending page. 

late into the evening of march 16th, david dobrik addressed all the speculation, accusations, and controversy that he had been radio silent on for months, if not years. not on his main channel, which has nearly 19 million subscribers. nor on his second channel, which has nearly 8 million subs. instead, he chose his Views podcast channel which has slightly over 1.5 million subs. posting his "apology" on the fairly new one was a very strange way to promote the podcast channel which only has six videos, including the "apology".

this is not an uncommon practice (shane dawson, logan paul, and cody ko have previously vetoed their popular channels to host their respective apologies instead vying for twitter and patreon), but it is curious of youtube to highlight it. is this their endorsement of david's iteration of logan's "i have had a continued lapse of judgment"? youtube came down hardest on logan paul, although they never commented directly on why they trended it for days and did not even age restrict it after manually reviewing it. nor have they ever faced true scrutiny of their rewarding of logan and his brother jake's controversial content until they both imploded. very messily. but have both since recovered and found new havens of youtube. logan has his podcast and jake does pay-per-view weddings and boxing matches. felix of pewdiepie fame still remains king of youtube with 109 million subscribers, despite his quiet public endorsement of some quite disturbing political channels. shane dawson's channel housing some very questionable videos remains quietly collecting ad sense, while other creators have been banned for using copyright music or using copyrighted clips to provide commentary on even if they fell under fair use. there are approximately 30,000 videos uploaded to youtube every hour. understandably, some videos will fall through the cracks. but.....globally trend one video made in poor taste, shame on youtube. consistently do so, still shame on youtube. 

they already have youtube in their corner and so i will not certainly not be the one to assist them in defending men, let alone straight white men. BUT when society props them up so faithfully and then they find a platform that does the same, it is no true mystery why so many of the Mighty Creators have fallen just as rapidly as youtube allowed them to fly high. 

logan paul once made vlogs about walking to trader joe's and then going back to his apartment to make chicken and waffles. that was the whole vlog. a little over a year later and tens of millions of subscribers later, he was filming a dead body. at the end of the day, everyone is obviously responsible for their own content. but i have always found it odd how youtube manages to be at the forefront of several major scandals, yet ultimately remains a footnote. similar to how twitter banned donald trump days before he would leave office, when they had the wherewithal to do so the first instance he tweeted something unbecoming to the platform. these private social media companies will milk their cash cows for every drop then leave them out to pasture once they have nothing left to gain. i do not think cancel culture is a real thing nor do i endorse mob mentality. but i also think that if a company is going to verbally admonish one of their creators, they should put their money where their mouth is instead of wasting everyone's time with their legalese lip service.

i think youtube has been let off hook too many times, and far too easily. i think they should have to sit right beside their fallen creators in shame and face public anger. however i, not unlike shrek and onions, contain layers. and one crucial layer of mine would go as far as to say that the invention of youtube is better than sliced bread. i was 13 when youtube debuted and i was shook, to say the least. i have always gravitated toward youtube and loved the social element to it, far more than any other social media platform. showing my friends and family videos of a man dancing in a banana costume or of a cute little kid singing usher's song to him or a news anchor swearing on live television when a bug flies in his mouth. there is endless content to consume. and as someone who has taken on the burden of carrying the entertainment industry on my back, youtube is a haven of clips and content from every corner of every industry. what other platform can you learn how to change a toilet seat cover, hear a detailed breakdown of whether or not the cat would have actually been able to survive in homeward bound, AND watch every perfect song cover that buffcorrell blesses us with. (my personal favourite is still sophie's "it's okay to cry".) 

i am ashamed to say that i will always be in my flop era when it comes to youtube consumption. thankfully, i can say that i am (mostly) past the era of my addiction to family vlogs but i can also hardly refer to my subscription feed as elite. when i was younger, we would consume videos constantly after school and on the weekends. when i was not chatting with strangers on aol chatrooms, i was watching hank green inadvertently invent e-books and john sing the theme song to blossom. when i was a teenager, wednesday was ladies night at the local dance club and also the upload day of miss jenna marbles. we would sit in the living room at 2am after nights that i am glad nobody was documenting on youtube, and watch jenna's new video in between hours of watching/making vines. as someone who has watched every episode of grey's anatomy since the pilot aired/someone who treated tgit as a weekly national holiday, i am aware of appointment television and often scheduled my life around it growing up. but youtube snuck its way into my routines and slowly became my go to source of white noise, sometimes literally. when i wash the dishes, i am more likely to put on a youtube video than my exquisitely curated cleaning bops playlist. sometimes longer than even the zack snyder cut of justice league and certainly more digestible than quibi's well....everything, i always find myself turning to the the wife of google cofounder/ceo of 23 and me's sister's website when i need quick entertainment.

i am not sure how david dobrik entered into my life. i never was familiar with his vines and his content is not normally the type i would indulge, but there i was tuned in three times a week for four minutes and twenty seconds. one of his early videos must have crept into my recommended viewing, so i watched it and then never stopped. if his videos were longer, i wonder if i would have gotten hooked. maybe. probably not, though. he was well into maybe a year of making his podcasts when i finally listened to one and realised i had never thought of him at all, if ever. years of listening to his boisterous laugh for the majority of those 260 seconds, but i never really noticed him. maybe because he is a few years younger than me, but i never really found him that funny or interesting. not when my best friend ended up on a private boat with him for a birthday party and certainly not when he was torturing his friends with "pranks" and animals. i hate surprises and pranks. like i said, i have no idea why i ever got into his content. but maybe that is the point. it was thoughtless and fun and easy to digest and then it was over. every other day, consistently for years. i hate commitment but love consistency. i am a virgo moon so routine is so, so sexy to me. and weirdly so was david talking about how sweaty his hands were. and how much he loved one of MY favourite movies, about time. and so many other little things that made my heart grow fonder for him that he spilled frequently on his podcast. i loved how open he was and this new side of him was very intriguing for me. i listened to the podcasts i had previously missed back to back to back one day while i was cooking dinner, then cleaning the house the next day. in between the not so interesting one liners and stories, david would reveal something new about himself and it felt like when taylor swift used to leave clues in the lyrics of her albums. the annoying prankster with the surprisingly large posterior i had known for years was reintroducing himself to me. he was the same, and yet different. the other factor in david endearing himself to me was none other than trisha paytas. he had more of a lightness around her; something softer, more vulnerable. in his videos, he was the mastermind director voyeur, following his friends around. with trisha, he was bashfully wolfing down food with her and getting put in his place by the queen of youtube. she was unafraid to call him out. she still is not. ironically and fittingly, the two things that made me love david dobrik are the two things that make me hate david dobrik.

trisha paytas making the video entitled "why david dobrik is ted bundy a horrible human being" was truly a moment in time. it was following a period of peace following a whirlwind back and forth series of videos between trisha and her ex-boyfriend, jason nash. i cannot always have trisha's back when it comes to her old videos and past behaviours, but when it comes to paytas v nash i am definitely team trish. having a front row seat to their relationship unfold, it always made me so annoyed how jason would speak to her and in turn, let others speak to her. trisha has been many different things during her decade of a career on youtube, but being loyal to a fault has been remained unwavering as her calling card. in fact, that loyalty to shane and to trolling is what ultimately led to me unsubscribing to my favourite online frenemy. jason taking advantage of that love and loyalty for content and a relationship seemed unfair, but she was a willing participant in the relationship so also in the videos. or so it seemed. 

there's an episode of how i met your mother called spoiler alert. in it, the sound of shattering glass is heard when one character "spoils" a previously overlooked trait in another character. although that show is erased from my mind out of self preservation after that terrible series finale, i still think about that a lot. of course i liked david when i listened to him on his podcast; i had been watching his videos for years. of course david was as charming as snake or as trisha said ted bundy; i had been watching his videos for years.

trisha alleged several things in that infamous video, and i believed every one. yet she and brandon calvillo are the only ones i ended up unsubscribed to. i never doubted that a 24 year old should not have to hear about what happened in his girlfriend's homeroom class. like david, it was easier for me to just sideline brandon so i could continue to enjoy watching someone get a new car to the tune of my beloved abba. i feel a lot of remorse as a viewer as more of the behind scenes reality of david's vlogs come to light, but i also feel a lot of remorse to trisha. i laughed watching that video because of course she called him ted bundy. and of course he was! leos, including the dicpario variety, have never impressed me with their shenanigans and i am never surprised to hear of the terror of their ways. i knew trisha was right, but i could not truly accept what she was saying. part of me still cannot. she may have been laughing in the vlogs, but sometimes she was not. there were only 260 seconds of footage three times a week, and we often saw her exclaiming how much she was not having a good time or enjoying the jokes. and that was the footage we did see. 

in the 2021 hbo docuseries allen v farrow, a psychologist talks about how hard it is to accept that a celebrity we love has done wrong. not necessarily because we think that they are so infallible, but because we have aligned ourselves and our trust with them and that is the hardest part to accept. that we were wrong. that i was wrong. that i still am wrong. at the beginning of the docuseries, i would be confidently able to say that david dobrik is very unlike woody allen. while both are lovers of film, directors emboldened by the camera, and known for their quirks, woody not only did an unforgivable thing but then spent decades actively trying to bury it. david never buried his sins, he simply remained silent on them. or so i thought that was a difference. but days after the docuseries wrapped up, the insider article and david's response to it makes me not as confident in their dissimilarities.

i do not think david dobrik should be deplatformed. i think he still has the opportunity to yield the giant platform and influence he does have for good. i think he can take the giant and unforgivable things he has done as a teaching tool to the same people that currently emulate his bad behaviour. or at least i should say, i hope he does. i still have hope for him. maybe it is false hope. maybe i am superman and fire signs are my kryptonite. honestly, i do not know if i would take my hope for him to vegas. the odds are not looking good. but i think he should have a chance to make his wrongs right. but that would first take acknowledging them. if he actually wants to talk, unlike his comment section, my line remains open. i have plenty i could talk to him about....

on the h3h3 podcast, after interviewing former member of the vlog squad big nik and letting trisha air out her grievances with david on another podcast frenemies, ethan and hila klein offered the floor to one of their producers to defend david before they interviewed another former vlog squad member, seth. ab (the producer) was a david fan and had watched the videos for years. it was only right that someone in david's corner have a chance to defend their king. but unfortunately for my favourite heartthrob, ab was a lamb to slaughter in what would be a much larger fight. because david's fans are just that. fans. we know what david wants us to know and are given constant content to oversaturate the information he does not want us to know. i have watched the majority, if not all, of david's vlogs. i have seen his instagram stories of what he is having for lunch. i have watched him cry with his ex-girlfriend when they broke up. i have seen the vlogs from different angles in his friends' vlogs and instagram stories. i could probably tell you more of what david has done in the past couple of years than i could remember what i have done. but i do not know david. if we met on the street, he certainly would not know me. and no matter how many different perspectives i have viewed on a particular vlog, i was never there. the only people that could speak to what actually happened on the day are the ones that were there. and although his video "let's talk" was his first formal addressing of controvery, we have heard his side for years. and just like his "apology" video had the comments turned off, he had final edit. and now those who had actually been silent are speaking out. and what they are saying is so beyond heartbreaking. not just because it happened, but because we watched it happened but did not truly see. 

david's "apology" video was an "apology" video because there was no true apology. david may not be the one who kissed seth, but he definitely knew he did not want to kiss jason. there is no questioning that. that is not an obvious inference, but rather an admission he himself made on his podcast that seth's life would be ruined for 3-5 years. i would like to think that if he had known how heavily it would weigh on seth, he would not have ever done it the first time. or the second time. or if he knew how emboldened he would make strangers to harass big nik on the street, he would have made him the butt of less jokes. i would hope that he only ever truly wanted to make content that made everyone participatin in and watching feel good. but i also would have hoped that watching a group of girls carry their friend from his roommate's bed to the bathroom to puke because she was unable to stand on her own, he would have scrapped the vlog idea altogether. that he would have found something else to film when the girls originally stated that they were more interested in meeting david than performing sexual acts on david's friend for one of david's youtube videos. i would have hoped that him seeing this girl in clear distress, enough distress to make him and todd smith and brandon calvillo joke about spending the next 20 years in prison, that he would have been torn up with guilt instead of the desire to do reshoots to make the narrative of the vlog more uplifting instead of the ugly truth it was. 

david has always portrayed himself as fun loving, someone who valued genuine moments and highlighting the good times between his friends above all else. but this is none of these things. this is wilful knowledge of something sinister and gleeful coverup. maybe it was just a continued lapse of judgement, so motivated by the next vlog that he lived in a dark vacuum of content creation and had no time to truly think about what he was doing. he was 21 at the time so maybe he was not processing the gravity of his actions properly. he is now only 24 so maybe he still does not. or maybe not.

in the "let's talk" video, david said he knows that actions speak louder than words. how telling, i thought as i was watching it. that less than two weeks before we were watching his actions unfold when his words were none. sending a screenshot of old texts to friends as as way to discredit seth's truth, in the middle of a video bashing seth's character. he did not make that video, but as always he was present in the shadows of it, safely behind the scenes. scott called seth a liar, not david. dom and jason and brandon did unspeakable things, not david. trisha made several videos about him; david has not spoken her name aloud in years. his hands have somehow always remained clean, even when he was covered in dirt.

i think i was holding out hope that the david i loved would somehow prevail through all of this. that he would come out and say all the right things and do the right thing and it would all be ok. honestly, i still do. i think that hope is easier to hold onto than the fact that the two minute video of legal niceties may be the only thing we get from david. in lieu of how financially tied to his brand being clean he is, it is more likely that david will let his actions speak where his words will be silent to save face and bank for his ever growing empire. as loving and warm and caring as he has always made himself come across in videos that did not matter, when it does matter he has come across as anything but. the stark contrast of david's own character in his vlogs and across his social media platforms versus him in real life has been beyond shocking as the two grow further apart with every day of passing inaction. as david said to dom in response to dom addressing his first allegations of sexual misconduct, "being an idiot is easy. owning up to it is tough!" i do not know what at this point would suffice from david. are there any words or actions he could take that would make it ok? i do not know. but i would, at the very least, like to see him try.